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Wednesday, March 11, 2015

70. Sappers

Sappers have become infamous in the decades pre and post-Fall. They are automated mine-layers, rendering swathes of ground intensely dangerous. Many infugees were ultimately killed by mines created by sappers belonging to desperate, dying militaries or suborned by TITANs. They are still common around the TITAN Quarantine Zones, and are used by militant groups as automated saboteurs and trappers. They are disconcertingly uninteresting, with a generic arachnid/crab body-plan, designed to keep a low profile.

Sappers are by no means the smartest robots, but they can be very clever within their specialization. When activated, a sapper will analyze its environment, looking for chokepoints, common pathways, roads, and any areas that appear well used or traveled. The minefields it creates are designed for its specific area of operations: they are smart enough to plant large, anti-vehicle mines on roadways, scatter anti-personnel mines along trails, plant charges that will collapse bridges and tunnels, and even rig traps into local devices and furniture. They contain libraries of potential explosive and non-explosive devices, and while frag, HEAP and plasma are common, everything from EMPs to toxic gasses may be used.

Once a sapper has either saturated its area with mines or exhausted its feedstock it will use its chameleon skin and grip pads to hide itself, often burrowing into regolith or clinging to ceilings. It will wait, scavenging for materials and rebuilding its minefields, until destroyed or ordered to stand down.Mechanics
Sappers are robots [High]

They must typically be supplied with special feedstock for fabricating explosives [Low]